I want all the network devices in my house to log to a central location, so that log messages can be
- stored permanently (if I switch off an access point, normally all logs are gone), and
- automatically checked for interesting events.
So I needed to set up my internal Ubuntu-based server to receive log messages from these devices via the syslog protocol.
My requirements were:
- Logs from different devices should go into a dedicated file each.
- Logs from the local machine should not go into any of these files, but the standard Ubuntu logging should be continued to be observed.
It took me a while to figure out how the “ultimate” configuration should be, but here’s the result in case anybody else has similar requirements: